The Beatles Anthology Podcast

Last week the Beatles released a new 3-part podcast that takes a look at Beatles Anthology project from twenty years ago — “British music journalists and Beatles experts Kevin Holwett and Mark Ellen discuss the classic Anthology releases, shining a light on the fascinating stories behind these albums which tell the story of the development of The Beatles career.” — to accompany the recent addition of the Anthology to various online streaming services.

anthology-avatarThe idea of this podcast, it seems to me, is to be a quick guide to the Anthology collections for the streaming audience who is just discovering these twenty year-old outtakes collections. Holwett and Ellen discuss the content of each of the three Anthology volumes, and they put the songs from each volume into some context in the terms of Beatles history. Holwett and Ellen have a nice rapport — Holwett, the calm expert; Ellen, the excitable fan. The episodes are brief, just fifteen minutes each, yet they manage to cover the high points of each of the three collections, pointing out the songs that are worth checking out and noting how the outtakes show the way the Beatles worked in the studio.

This podcast isn’t essential listening, but even so it’s a nice introduction to these collections, even for a long-time Beatles fan like me. It’s certainly made me think about revisiting the Anthologies and some similarly themed bootleg collections that complement it.

You can find the program on iTunes, but it’s also available through an RSS feed.

Published by Allyn

A writer, editor, journalist, sometimes coder, occasional historian, and all-around scholar, Allyn Gibson is the writer for Diamond Comic Distributors' monthly PREVIEWS catalog, used by comic book shops and throughout the comics industry, and the editor for its monthly order forms. In his over ten years in the industry, Allyn has interviewed comics creators and pop culture celebrities, covered conventions, analyzed industry revenue trends, and written copy for comics, toys, and other pop culture merchandise. Allyn is also known for his short fiction (including the Star Trek story "Make-Believe,"the Doctor Who short story "The Spindle of Necessity," and the ReDeus story "The Ginger Kid"). Allyn has been blogging regularly with WordPress since 2004.

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